By 1847 the Russian ballet had taken a leading place in Europe, but in a purely artistic sense it was still foreign in character, the librettos being built mainly on foreign themes or constructed to foreign music. With the advent of the composers Glinka, Dargomijsky, Seroff, Balakireff and Moussorgsky, it was evident that ballet faced a reform similar to that which music had undergone. The ballets of the old school had usually been divided into several acts and figures, each of which had _entrées_ and strictly prescribed rules for using various gestures, steps, etc., in certain places. They, however, failed to define the relation of emotion and acting to the plot and made dancing a complicated artificial salon-plant. An uninitiated logic could hardly grasp the hieroglyphic meaning of all the queer gymnastic tricks. With the engagement of Marius Petipa, in 1849, there came a change. Although a Frenchman by birth Petipa was just such a reformer in the ballet as Michelangelo was in sculpture. More powerful than any other master, he entered the sphere of choreographic art, transforming it completely, and assigning it new limits. Petipa was the master of a new ballet, an idealist in the strictest sense of the word. He sought for a universally available expression, and often even ignored questions of racial beauty. He gave himself up for many years to an anatomical study of the dance and the human body. By him the human form in all its majesty was valued for its own sake. To exhibit it in all conceivable attitudes and poses, to display it freely and grandly after the principles of classic beauty, was the aim of his endeavor. The weak decadent movements and the forced forms of the Paris and Milan schools were irritable to his broad views of the art of dancing. Unfettered subjectivity prevailed in his efforts, which admitted no objective realism in their absolute sway. All his method betrays an eternal struggle to introduce into dancing the most sublime ideas, the sway of idea over form. Whether a figure was natural or not interested him little, if it only expressed what was floating before his mind. Petipa infused a new life into Russian ballet. Nevertheless he could not wholly free himself from the mannerism of the time, nor could he yet find the path to perfect purity and naïveté of conception.